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On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy

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On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy Musicologica Brunensia 53 / 2018 / 1 https://doi.org/10.5817/MB2018-1-5 On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy Elena Khokhlova / [email protected] Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, CZ Abstract The study explores modern opera theater repertoires and focuses on the strategy of opera offering. Statistics and data analysis reveal strong tendencies of monotony, sameness, and repetitiveness of repertoire across the biggest and most productive opera houses in the world. The two ongoing tendencies are that the majority of opera theaters resort to reproducing a shortlist of canonized masterpieces and that there are hardly any new works presented on- stage since the middle of the 20th century. Opera is possibly the most complex art form that demands not only immense resources and skills from its producers but also incredible attention and loyalty from the consumers. Complexity and demanding nature of this art form is certainly amongst the shaping factors of modern opera economy. But do constant reproduction of monotonous repertoire and recy- cling of the same opera titles have ulterior motives? Keywords opera production, playbill, repertoire, revival, remake, opera economy, audience 65 Elena Khokhlova On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy What if theaters across the world were to limit their playbill offer to a tiny number of fa- mous classics and resort to reproducing and recycling these titles from season to season? The repertoire would probably shrink to a mixture of Shakespeares, a Sophocles, a pair of Chekhovs and Moliers, spiced up by more modern Bernard Shaw and Tennessee Wil- liams. And what if there mainly were but the same plays constantly produced, the titles relaying on theater posters and billboards all over the world for decades? Yet Theater Communication Group’s annual statistics based on American non-for- profit “straight” theater repertoires reveals that the lists of the most performed titles significantly differ from year to year.1 It does not mean that there are no rotating plays in theater repertoire. In fact, Shakespeare’s plays alone top the list on the regular basis.2 But the classics hardly represent the backbone in this industry, leaving space for flexible repertoire renewal and update.3 Now, a mere glance at a random opera playbill is enough to spot the rotation of familiar titles and very little number of famous composers present in it. Interestingly, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries “almost all opera was new […] Revivals might occur, but it was more prestigious to have a brand-new work”.4 From today’s perspective though, the vast majority of staged operas across the globe are revivals or remakes. For a tradition that is older than 400 years one would expect that opera has a monstrous list of works to make a busy playbill that changes every season. And it does, yet only a limited number of those is produced. Observations and Data Once a proud presenter of luxurious inflow of new work every year, modern opera in- dustry seems rather stagnant. A certain list of operatic titles is familiar not only to the regular opera audience but even to the opera outsiders. In fact, those who do not attend operas often know about the existence of such works as Tosca, Madama Butterfly, or Car- 1 TRAN, Diep. The Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2017-18 Season. URL: https://www.americantheatre. org/2017/09/21/the-top-10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2017-18-season/ [retrieved 1-Apr-2018]; TRAN, Diep. The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2016-17. URL: https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/09/21/the-top- 10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2016-17-season/ [retrieved 1-Apr-2018]; TRAN, Diep. The Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2015–16 Season. URL: https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/09/16/the-top-10-most-produced- plays-of-the-2015-16-season/ [retrieved 1-Apr-2018]; TRAN, Diep. The Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2014–15 Season. URL: https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/09/23/top-10-plays-2014-2015/ [retrieved 1-Apr-2018] 2 TRAN, Diep. The Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of the 2017-18 Season - American Theater. A Publication of Theater Communications Group. URL: https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/09/21/the-top-10-most-pro- duced-plays-of-the-2017-18-season/ [retrieved 1-Apr-2018] 3 This finding is also backed up by Analysis of Theatre in English by Art Council England demonstrating that by the year 2013 theater repertoire consists of approximately 60% of new work versus revivals while new plays account for over 50% in repertoire of straight theater – Final Report by BOP Consulting & Graham Dev- lin Associates, 13th September - 2016, p. 41. URL: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/down- load-file/Analysis%20of%20Theatre%20in%20England%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf [retrieved 7-Apr-2018] 4 ABBATE, C. Parker, R. A History of Opera. The Last 400 Years. Penguin Books, 2015, p. 521. 66 Elena Khokhlova On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy men. It happens either because this outside audience was once forced to an opera house to see an obligatory La Traviata or due to constant exposure to posters, billboards, an- nouncements, flyers, and other urban opera advertisement which flashes the titles every season. According to the Operabase statistics that gathers data from around the world (“over 25.000 performances of opera every year”5) the same composers and the same titles have been dominating the top 10 most performed operas in the past five seasons (2010/2011 through 2015/2016). The listing in Table 1 is based on the latest data gathered from 116730 performances of over than 900 opera companies within the five seasons between 2011/2012 and 2015/2016: Global Ranking in National Composer Work # of perfor- # of produc- ranking 2015/2016 ranking mances tions 1 1 it (#1) Verdi (#1) La traviata 4190 869 2 2 at (#1) Mozart (#1) Die Zauberflote 3310 561 3 3 fr (#1) Bizet (#1) Carmen 3280 691 4 4 it (#2) Puccini (#1) La bohéme 3131 672 5 5 it (#3) Puccini (#2) Tosca 2694 608 6 6 it (#4) Puccini (#3) Madama Butterfly 2641 634 7 7 it (#5) Rossini (#1) Il barbiere di Siviglia 2549 591 8 8 at (#2) Mozart (#2) Le nozze di Figaro 2483 545 9 9 at (#3) Mozart (#3) Don Giovanni 2299 473 10 10 it (#6) Verdi (#2) Rigoletto 2285 523 Table 1. The most performed composers and their operatic works, 2011 through 20166 These ten operas (out of 2658 listed in the database) cover 28862 out of 116730 per- formances and 6167 out of 26984 productions. It means that only 0.37% of opera titles account for 24.7% of all opera performances and 22.8% of all opera productions in the range. The fact that the global ranking here corresponds with seasonal and national ratings pinpoints the tendency of modern opera playbills to be repetitive and monotonous. To be more consistent I compared this data with the most recent season (2017/2018) of the most productive opera companies in the world. In order to create the representative group I have selected the largest and most influential opera houses that are based in the countries (and selected cities) with the highest opera production density in season 2015/2016, as per Operabase7 (see Tables 2 and 3). 5 Operabase. URL: http://operabase.com/index.cgi?lang=en [retrieved 2-Apr-2018] 6 The table is copied from the Operabase. URL: http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&break=0&show=oper a&no=10&nat= [retrieved 1-Apr-2018] 7 Operabase. URL: http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&splash=t [retrieved 30-Mar-2018] 67 Elena Khokhlova On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy Ranking in 2015/2016 Country # of productions in country 1 Germany 6795 2 United States 1657 3 Russia 1490 4 Italy 1393 5 Austria 1163 6 France 1020 7 United Kingdom 989 8 Czech Republic 818 Table 2. Leading countries in number of opera productions in season 2015/2016, as per Operabase8 Ranking per production density Ranking in the country City # of productions in city 1 ru (#1) Moscow 582 2 at (#1) Wien 535 3 de (#1) Berlin 527 4 uk (#1) London 427 7 cz (#1) Praha 357 9 us (#1) New York 284 11 fr (#1) Paris 245 22 it (#1) Venezia 139 Table 3. Representative cities in leading countries in season 2015/2016, as per Operabase9 I have sourced the opera productions and the number of separate operatic titles by the same composer presented in the season from the official opera houses web-pages. The tables below represent which and how many of the world most performed titles are included in the representative houses’ playbill in seasons 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 (if available – unfortunately, not all the opera companies announced their upcoming sea- son by the time of conducting this study). Empty cells mean that the title is not present in the season repertoire, while “No data” stands for no published information about the upcoming season. 8 The table is taken from Operabase. URL: http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&break=0&show=natio n&no=10 [retrieved 1-Apr-2018] 9 The table is taken from Operabase. URL: http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&break=0&show=loc&n o=10&nat= [retrieved 2-Apr-2018] 68 Elena Khokhlova On Monotony of Opera Playbill and Underlying Economy Season 2017/2018 traviata La Die Zauberflote Carmen bohéme La Tosca Madama Butterfly di Siviglia Il barbiere di Figaro nozze Le Don Giovanni Rigoletto Bolshoi Theater of Russia (ru) Yes Yes Yes Yes Teatro la Fenice (it) Yes Yes Yes Yes Prague National Theater (cz) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Wiener Staatsoper (at) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Royal Opera House (uk) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Metropolitan Opera (us) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Opéra national de Paris (fr) Yes Yes Yes Deutsche Oper Berlin (de) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Table 4.
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